Sunday - March 01, 2015

Dark Souls II - Scholar Of The First Sin Gameplay

This new gameplay video from Bandai Namco games for Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin for PC, PS4 and Xbox One highlights the new NPC invader, The Forlorn, as he hunts down players through the game with deadly skill and tenacity.

Dark Souls II

CT: Demon's Revenge - Plans For March

by Couchpotato, 04:55

Trexrell's latest update for CT: Demon's Revenge has information about the developers plan for march. The update talks about a new demo, and release date.

Big Plans For March

So we are ending our February and coming into what could be our biggest event since our Kickstarter campaign. We are on a schedule of releasing our playable demo by the third week of March. We want to give you guys a little incite of what the demo will contain and how things have changed since our campaign up until now.

Demo News

The demo will be about an hour long depending on how you play it. It will be more or less an intro into the actual story and feature our main character. When we release the demo we are really going to be looking for some strong feedback, everything will be upgraded and we feel we can not make a great experience without your input. Our goal is to make a really great game, we want the game to do well commercially and critically.

The Full Game

We have plans to release the game in the near two to three months. That being said, I want to clarify what this game will feature and what may be left out as far as the first chapter goes. As you all should know, this game is going to be chapter 1 of a full length RPG experience. We aim to make the chapters at least between 14 and 17 hours. We have 3 playable characters, 8 areas in 4 locations, and a few secret ones too, all in the first chapter.

What we may or may not be leaving out is an additional playable character and 3 more areas which would just take a little bit more time but could be added to the next chapter. We shall find out what we could do with that by the end of March.

Let us know how you feel about this as we want you all to feel like you are getting your pledge's worth. We want everyone to feel satisfied with our game and their pledge so if you have any concerns at all please feel free to let us know! We are always willing to talk about it and we will respond promptly.

Saturday - February 28, 2015

Pillars of Eternity - Interview @ PCGamesN

Earlier this month, I sat in a slightly uncomfortable chair while Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer narrated an hour of monster murder in Pillars of Eternity. Alongside the fantastical adventuring and branching dialogue are plenty of battles. The party wandered through sprawling dungeons, gothic castles and clifftop forests, all full of a wide variety of nasties waiting to be set on fire or stabbed.

MyRPG Master - Available on Early Access

MyRPG is a set of many editors that will help you create your 3D (MMO)RPG World. These editors are divided into 4 categories: 3D editors, GUI editors, Rules editors and Universe editors. My RPG is a tool that is able to create game universes and storylines playable solo or multi through local network or online servers.

To be honest, a bit relieved that we did in fact reach this milestone.

Incredibly excited that we can now make the game we have so passionately wanted to make for twenty years, and do it together with you.

The team will celebrate and enjoy for a long moment… then right back to work! We are relishing climbing up into the stretch goals over the next 6 days of the campaign. Let’s enjoy that together. Then we can have an even bigger collective celebration.

CrossCode

Darkest Dungeon - Interview @ Venturebeat

by Couchpotato, 05:48

Jason Wilson of VentureBeat interviewed Tyler Sigman and Chris Bourassa of Red Hook Studios this week to talk about Darkest Dungeon, and the games difficulty.

GamesBeat: I’ve been playing RPGs since the early 1980s. The one thing I noticed is that, almost universally, systems are geared toward not holding the player back but toward encouraging player success. That’s completely the opposite with your game. How different is the mindset that you have to be in, as a developer, to do this?

Sigman: I think you have to remember what you set out to do. Because there’s lots of pressures during development, and certainly even now, to make the game easier across the board. Why are you penalizing for this? Why can’t I save or bring the hero back? That’s not what we set out to do. We set out to make you feel like there’s a cost. We didn’t set out to kill everybody. But I think—that’s something we’ve been able to do really well, is hold true to that vision. Even in times where you’re going to get feedback that’s like, are you sure you want to do that? You’re going to be alienating a lot of players. But we never really set out to make the game for everyone. In having that strong vision, we ended up making it appeal to more people than we ever thought.

Bourassa: Yeah, that’s a great way to say it. The game is fundamentally different. It takes a left when a lot of RPGs take a right, at the very start of the road. We’re not asking you to build one party and get attached to them. You shouldn’t have an expectation of being able to finish a quest. That’s not bad balance. That’s by design. Sometimes things go wrong. You should get in the dungeon and realize you’re outmatched. For whatever reason you’re not getting the rolls you want. You should cut and run. That’s a very foreign mindset for a lot of people who equate balance with progression, immediate moment-to-moment progression. We’re asking players to take a long view of the campaign and use their heroes as a means to an end, as opposed to ends in themselves. Having the two of us, Tyler and I, go back and forth on the game, having built it up from scratch together from a conceptual standpoint, we’ve been able to act as checks and balances to each other. There have been times where I’m like, I think we should make this easier, and Tyler’s like, no, remember this! Remember that! And there’s been the reverse, where something’s really important and I feel we have to keep it in because of our core vision. It’s one of the advantages in having two heads on the snake, I think. We’ve been able to keep close to what we initially set out to do, and incidentally promised to our Kickstarter backers.

Sigman: We talk about this a lot, too. Chris and I played so many classics as well. I’m in the same era as you, everything from D&D basic set — not Chainmail, I was just being born, but the Basic Set — there are just so many good products out there. Chris said that we’re not going to out-Torchlight Torchlight, which was a great Diablo—I don’t want to say knockoff, but in that vein. I’m not ripping it at all. It’s a cool game. Legend of Grimrock brought back Eye of the Beholder and all that stuff and did an awesome job. We love that space, but we didn’t want to enter it just trying to do something either slightly better than the last guy, or maybe not even as good, because some of those are really amazing games. Our love of RPGs in the classic way of doing it is what got us excited about adding a twist, really.

Edge Of Eternity - Crafting Goal Reached

You all must wonder why nothing happened on our side since we passed the 95k$ goal last night. To be honest we were a bit taken by surprise by a very generous donator from the US that backed us for... 10 000$. He crushed the goal all by himself!

So yeah, ok, we did wait and see if that was really real or if this amazing support turned out to be some kind of joke. A few PM later it’s seems to be all real. If it’s confirmed, man, you are really amazing! We will have to think a very special reward pack just for you.

With this unexpected support we did achieved the Crafting goal. Yet another cool feature we will be able to add to Edge of Eternity. As we said, we want to put a particular attention on this and make it really interresting for our gamers. We read several interesting comments about what you would expect and how you would improve the system we presented. Be assured we are reading. Keep on giving us this kind of feedback, this really helps.

Edge Of Eternity

Path of Exile - New Patch & Q&A Answers

by Couchpotato, 05:39

Grinding Gear Games posted the answers to last weeks Q&A on the Path of Exile forums, and also announced patch 1.3.1c was released this week.

We've deployed Patch 1.3.1c, which improves client performance, fixes a bug and introduces two new microtransactions: Eagle Claw Wand Skin and the Ghost Flicker Strike Skill Effect. Today's news post also includes the answers to questions from the Developeract Q&A earlier this week.

RPG Codex - OtherSide Entertainment Interview

When the opportunity arose for me to visit OtherSide Entertainment and meet the team behind the latest oldschool RPG on Kickstarter, Underworld Ascendant, I leapt at the chance. These were veterans of the dearly departed Looking Glass Studios, the studio that was responsible for classics such as Ultima Underworld, System Shock and Thief. The thought of meeting the designers of what I consider the greatest computer games of all time made me feel as giddy as a schoolgirl on her first date. After the exchange of a few emails, I got in my car and was soon on my way to their office in Boston. As I drove, I began to think:

“Why were these games so important to me? Why do they still resonate with me, and many others, even today?” Ever after all this time, I still play every one of them at least once every few years. Citadel Station & SHODAN, The City & Garrett, the Stygian Abyss & the Avatar, have all become real places to me in a sense. I'd argue that even though it was Origin who owned the slogan “We create worlds”, it was really Looking Glass that best lived up to it. The environments that they created allowed you to explore, discover and most importantly play the way you wanted to. They were “sandboxes” before that became an overused term. As I pulled up to OtherSide's office, I wondered whether these guys still had one more Looking Glass game left in them.

RPG Codex

Age of Grit - New Development Update

by Couchpotato, 05:32

iqSoup's latest update for Age of Grit explains what the developer has been working on in the last few months since they posted the last kickstarter update.

We've been pretty busy over here and have made a lot of progress! Age of Grit is gradually starting to coalesce. A big chunk of the game's back-end systems has been taken care of. The dialog system is working well and the questing system should be finished very soon. These are two critical systems that lay the groundwork for much of the game's complexity. We are also making strides forward with the combat sequence. The combat UI is underway and the ruleset has been fleshed out and is being fine tuned. We'e implemented the system for building ships from within the game--which is important for the modular design we are going with for the airships.

We're also hard at work on NPCs. We've finished a bunch of NPCs already and we're chipping away at more each day. I spent much of the last week or two finishing up all the NPC briefing documents. The art team uses these documents to create the artwork needed for each NPC. Usually I will try to finish the briefing docs as they are needed by the art team, but now they are all completed for all the NPCs in the entire game. This a huge milestone--there are hundreds upon hundreds of in-game NPCs that I needed to write out detailed descriptions for. It is one of the major writing tasks on my plate, finishing it means I can now focus more time on other areas of the game.

Our Backerkit fundraising campaign will soon be coming to an end. We haven't seen as much success as we've expected, but perhaps that's because our main push was during the last few months when the crowfunding season typically tends to slow down. Next week we are going to give it one last push to try to raise some extra funds through add-ons and preorders. All of you have already done so much and we're so incredibly grateful, but if you'd like please check out some of our add-ons and see if you're interested. We'd greatly appreciate it and every dollar help make the game a bit better. All funds raised through Backerkit will go towards more artwork for the game--predominately more airships designs.

Hand of Fate - Impression @ RPGamers

Hand of Fate has a lot going for it. The card-based encounter system is highly engaging and does a great job keeping the tension, with players never certain whether the cards they were hoping for or fearing are going to appear next. It's a very good debut outing with plenty of areas that can be built upon; the action-RPG and card game combination is very much the sort of game you could see providing a ton of multiplayer enjoyment, although watching someone else play is quite entertaining as is.

Raven's Cry - Review @ Hooked Gamers

This ship is sinking with every passing moment, and there is no happy ending to be seen here. Raven's Cry encompasses a great idea, and it certainly looks nice until things are in motion, when they immediately start falling apart. As a game, this is a failure and while it's at least playable it doesn't mean you're likely to have fun while you're doing it. At most you'll try to convince yourself to like it as the water rises, until you're drowning in the realization that the ship isn't even sinking anymore; it's sitting at the bottom of the ocean.

Raven's Cry

Shadow Realms - Cancelling Helped SWTOR

by Couchpotato, 05:21

MMO-Play is the next site to respond to BioWare cancelling Shadow Realms, and the sit goes on tio say the cancellation helped Star Wars: The Old Republic.

When BioWare decided to get into the arena of mmorpg games, they did so in a major way with the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. While the online game was an immediate hit, it did fade somewhat in the months after launch. BioWare eventually turned their eye to creating another mmo, Shadow Realms, that was vastly different in design and tone from SWTOR and their other intellectual properties. This new game was a combination of high magic, technology, and creepy mythology and had some intriguing features.All that came to naught when BioWare decided to cancel development of the game. While some gamers were sad to see this result, it could have a silver lining. Let's examine why cancelling Shadow Realms helps Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Wasteland 2 - Upgrading to Unity 5

We recently released the sixth major patch for Wasteland 2, which added Steam achievements for Mac and Linux, cleaned up some issues that were sitting on our lists, and included another pass on text and localization to make sure even the finest details are polished as best they can be. You can read the full patch notes here.

Part of the newfound freedom we’ve gained from being an exclusively crowdfunded company is that it allows us to offer a high level of post-release support. While this is normal practice for an active multiplayer game, we believe that the ongoing improvements to the single player experience in Wasteland 2 are worth the time and money. The game truly continues to be a passion project for the team here at inXile.

And we’re not done yet…

If you've been keeping a close eye on things, you might have heard tell that we're looking at doing some more balancing and improvements of Wasteland 2 in the future. We have expanded our original plan and decided that this is going to be a part of something much larger for all our fans.

In pursuit of this goal, one task we're working on right now is migrating the Wasteland 2 codebase from the Unity 4.5 engine to Unity 5, which will enable some new possibilities for us. A major benefit of moving to Unity 5 is that 5 will include many of the tools from Unity 4.x Pro. We relied on many of these tools during our development (like creating and building navigation meshes), and they will be available to modders without having to pay thousands of dollars for a Pro Unity license. There is no doubt that this migration will allow us to release better tools for modding to our community in the future.

So what’s the “something bigger” that I teased earlier? Let’s just say that the Orange County lifestyle might be getting to us as the game will be receiving a facelift. Unity 5 offers physically based shading, which is already starting to look amazing in the scenes we’ve touched up.

As well as visual improvements, we have quite a few quirky tricks up our sleeves. The character system is getting perked up and will include some new elements to modify gameplay. Of course, more details will be released in the future so stay tuned!

RPGWatch - Spiders Interview #3

Couchpotato: Now that you have released Bound By Flame, Faery: Legends Of Avalon, Mars War Logs, and Of Orcs and Men, what lessons have you learned from developing all of those games to make future games even better?

Jehanne Rousseau: Creating is never easy. You have to face the comments and criticism of your public. Face it and learn from it (at least I hope so). Of course we can't do everything our players want: sometimes because we don't know how to do it, sometime because it's not possible with current technology, but most of the time because we have a very limited budget. Despite all that, we're really trying to do our best with the budget we have. We're spending a lot of time reading our player's comments and we're really trying to improve each game based on what we read. Some comments really make us sad of course, or furious - we're human beings and some words can hurt. But some of these comments make us think and those are the best.I can't detail all the things we've learnt - all the player expectations here - but we're listening.

Here are a few screens from DungeonKingdom: Sign of the Moon being alpha tested. There is much more innovations for the architecture, but i'll stick on classic area of Adwij's temple to not spoil too much.

Underworld Ascendant - Final Week

Today we are entering the FINAL WEEK of our campaign. It’s been a wild ride. There are now more than 10,000 of us strong on this ride, and more coming in every minute. Yesterday was the best day the campaign has seen in over 2 weeks!

With this being the final week of the campaign, it’s time to shift into a higher gear…

We’ve got some awesome stretch goals, which many in this community want us to reach. We can deliver on at least some of these stretch goals if we can make a big push during this final week.

We have been holding steady at an average of $55 pledged per backer, with less than a dollar swing since the first week of the campaign. Some folks have already pledged all they can afford. We are humbled and deeply thankful to them for doing so.

Others folk are able to step up to higher tiers. As of this morning, we are less than $35,000 from reaching the $600,000 in base funding. If half of the 10,000 backers each stepped up their pledges by $10, we’d be well past that mark and into the first stretch goal overnight.

Getting past the $600,000 mark helps motivate those fans who are hesitant to pledge until the base goal is met to join us. We are virtually certain to reach the $600,000 at least a few days before campaign ends. Each day sooner that this happens is another day sooner to pull in these waiting-in-the-wings fans, which will in turn give us more momentum to reach higher stretch goals.

So please consider stepping up during this final stretch. It’s the most tangible way today you can leave your mark on what we are together building with Underworld Ascendant.

Pillars of Eternity - Preview @ GameWatcher

Snazzy graphics and spell effects, and enjoyable combat are both nice things to have in an RPG, there’s no doubt, but in some ways they’re the easiest things to get right. What a lot of games miss out on is that sense that the player has options, that if they’re clever there’s always another way to solve a problem. Admittedly this is a segment of Obsidian’s game they’ve specifically chosen to show a more peaceful approach of, and there’s no telling how much of the game assumes you’ll just march in and start magic-missiling every poor sod in the room, but Pillars looks like it’s also taking welcome inspiration from the frantic, making-it-up-as-we-go-along spirit of tabletop role-playing. This can only be a good thing.

DA:Inquisition - Creating the Visual FX Video

Whether you’re closing a Fade rift or raining down meteors on your enemies, you’re seeing Dragon Age: Inquisition’s visual FX at work. We’ll take you behind-the-scenes and show you how the game’s special effects enhance the player experience.

DA:Inquisition

Wave of Darkness - Upgraded Level Cap

The second kickstarter update for Wave of Darkness has news the game has information the game has earned $4,000, and talks about the upgraded level cap.

Well, really exciting stuff is happening around Wave of Darkness Kickstarter campaign! We passed $4,000 pledged and it's only the second day.

Once again we are asking you to please tell everyone you know about our campaign. The most important thing is to spread the word as far as we can.

But let's talk more about your in-game character. A really cool feature we are going to offer to Legends of Dawn players is that you are going to be able to transfer your Legends of Dawn character to Wave of Darkness! Furthermore, level cap is raised to 35, although that is prone to change (could be more), but you'll have to be careful since WoD contains much more regions than LoD, and much more badass monsters.

Fable Legends - Announced as Free to Play

Since starting development on Fable Legends, we’ve had two clear goals in mind. First and foremost, we’re aiming to create an amazing, fun gaming experience for our players. The feedback we’ve had so far from players in our closed beta, fans we’ve met at shows, and the gaming press indicates we’re well on our way to realising our first goal!

Our second goal is to ensure the game we’re working to create is available to as many players as possible. The first step to make that happen came when we announced this year that Fable Legends will be cross-playable on both Xbox One and Windows 10 PC. Today we’re announcing the next huge piece of news that’ll help us reach this goal.

Mother 4 - New Gameplay Trailer

Mother 4 follows the journey of three kids and the leader of a biker gang. With dark rumors of "Modern Men" running wild, these unassuming heroes set out to uncover the truth, no matter how dangerous. From bustling urban streets to secret volcano bases, all kinds of oddball thugs and impossible monsters stand in their way... but everything should be okay if they don't forget to write home.

InSomnia

CrossCode - A Retro 2D Action RPG

by Couchpotato, 04:59

Another game this week called CrossCodewas launched on Indiegogo, and the games developer is asking for €80,000 to help fund development.

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In CrossCode you will meet Lea, a player who is stuck in a fictional MMO of the distant future. She has also lost her memory and, on top of that, can’t speak. Now the only way to regain her memory is to play the game - hoping that fellow players won’t mistake her for a bot,

Liege

Shadowrun Online - Nordic Games to Publish

Nordic Games announced today they will be publishing Shadowrun Online.

Nordic Games teams up with Cliffhanger Productions to distribute Shadowrun

Co-op, tactical turn-based team combat in the Shadowrun universe coming to PC/MAC(Steam)/Linux(Steam) in Q2 2015

Vienna/AUSTRIA, 26th of February, 2015 - Nordic Games has announced its collaboration with Cliffhanger Productions to release the upcoming Shadowrun Online team tactical RPG. Shadowrun Online will step out of the shadows in Q2 2015 for PC, MAC and Linux.

“We are excited to cooperate with Cliffhanger Productions on multiple levels: some of us spent copious amounts of hours in the Shadowrun universe (armed with pen and paper), plus visiting Cliffhanger’s studio takes 15 minutes with public transportation to check out the latest internal build, so we can collaborate closely.”, commented Reinhard Pollice Business & Product Development Director, Nordic Games. “The former was reason enough to tackle this game together with Cliffhanger. We are currently looking at a Q2 release, but we will provide more information in the next weeks.”

“It just clicked between Nordic and us – we know and trust them to give Shadowrun the attention it deserves and we are looking forward to finalise Shadowrun Online and deliver a strategically demanding, turn-based co-op combat experience”, said Jan Wagner, co-founder of Cliffhanger Productions. “With Shadowrun Online, we put the emphasis on experiencing cataclysmic events in 2076, shaking Boston and the whole of North America, focusing the gameplay on tactical combat, truly individual characters and the team aspects of the role-playing experience. You can play the game as a full single player game, leading your team of runners into dangerous missions or you can join up with your friends or other players you meet in the game to face the dangers ahead.”

“Mystical blue flames danced up her hands to her fingertips as she sharpened her focus until the pile started shaking and swirling, manipulating itself until it formed a large humanoid stone figure standing ten feet tall.

In the meanwhile, we have added some interesting new features to our combat system. Your character can now command armies from the FPS menu, and some magic is powerful enough to destroy trees and buildings. Our combat system video is expected to be published very soon. So as always, stay tuned and keep spreading the word!

Thursday - February 26, 2015

The Meridian Shard - Interview @ RPGFrance

Q: What do you think of music in RPGs and games in general? Does it have to be emphatic or rather aim alienation (distance)? Are there game musics that left their mark on you?

Music and sound in general, is a key a part of setting atmosphere. It all depends on what you’re trying to get across to the player at that time, or on that level. Sometimes absolute silence works best. I have developed a few parts of The Meridian Shard where the only sound is of the wind and distant birds singing. I would say to use music sparingly, as this gives it a more powerful delivery. I’ve usually always enjoyed just about anything from Arnold Nesis, who scored games like Path of Exile and Our Darker Purpose.

Q: What are your favorite (Western and Japanese) RPGs?

The first RPG-like game I ever played was Dragon Warrior for NES. From there, I really enjoyed Final Fantasy 9, Baldur’s Gate and Dink Smallwood.

Q: Do you feel a difference in the European, US and Canadian publics'tastes?

I can see that the online media for games in general does change slightly depending on region, but I believe that with the progress of Steam’s growing international community, and the ability to digitally deliver virtually anything, that gamers from all over the world will soon have shared tastes in just about everything. There is no doubt however that the eastern European market is ravenous for dark fantasy RPGs. I think it is largely influenced by what you’re exposed to at a young age. Each country has had their introductory game titles over the years, but soon, it will all be at our fingertips at the same time.